Monthly Archives :
July 2018

The threat that Iran will choose to initiate a devastating war in the Middle East, from its perch in Syria, continues to rise. Last Thursday, forces wearing Syrian military uniforms along the Syrian side of the border with Israel at Quneitra in the Golan Heights hoisted the Syrian flag at the border crossing. It was the first time the regime had asserted…

There is no connection between the substance of Israel’s newly passed Nation State of the Jewish People law, and the debate its passage unleashed. On the one hand, supporters of the law led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insist that the law is a vital step in entrenching and protecting Israel’s Jewish identity. After the law passed last Thursday…

Last week, President Donald Trump’s Middle East team signaled a shift in the administration’s policy for contending with Hamas-controlled Gaza — one no prior administration had the courage to make. On July 19, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, his special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman published a joint op-ed in the Washington…

Did US President Donald Trump commit treason in Helsinki when he met Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin? Should he be impeached? That is what his opponents claim. Former president Barack Obama’s CIA director John Brennan accused Trump of treason outright. Brennan tweeted, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki [with Putin] rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high…

On a substantive level, it is impossible to understand the outcry against President Donald Trump following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday. Trump met with Putin because as president, he is required to meet with the leader of Russia just as every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to meet with his counterpart at…

The time has come for Israel and the U.S. to let Gaza fail. It is not in America’s interest, and it certainly is not in Israel’s interest, to assist Gaza’s terror regime in any way. This means there should be no push to develop Gaza economically. There should be no plan to build new infrastructure in the Hamas-ruled terror fiefdom…

Due to an unusual conflation of events, over the past two weeks we’ve caught a rare glimpse of the face of European foreign policy. We shouldn’t let it pass unremarked. Last Friday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini presided over a curious summit in Vienna. In the same hall where she and her colleagues concluded the nuclear deal…

Is President Donald Trump going to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) when he attends its summit in Brussels on July 12? To watch and read the commentary being broadcast and published by the foreign policy elite on both sides of the Atlantic, it certainly seems like it. One of the interesting aspects of the hysteria is that NATO’s supporters never seem to think it is necessary to explain…

Since President Donald Trump entered the White House, hardly a day has gone by without Israel receiving a warning from a Democratic politician or a liberal American Jewish leader that it had better curb its enthusiasm and be reticent in its support for Trump and his policies. The partisan split is clear. A Pew survey of American support for Israel in January…

On Monday, seven former US ambassadors to the UN sent a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisting that the administration restore full funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that funds so-called Palestinian refugees. Since UNRWA was established in 1949, the US has given nearly $5 billion to the agency tasked with perpetuating refugee status among descendants of…